Emergency situations can arise in remote areas that are not accessible by roads or pathways. Such emergency situations can include activities surrounding the rescue and retrieval of downed aircraft, forest fires, natural disasters, rural terrorist attacks, coordinated searches for lost or missing persons, rural manhunts, and accidental ecological poisonings which can include nuclear, chemical, or biological discharges. However, due to the remoteness of a given location, it may be necessary that multiple emergency response parties be deployed over a large geographic area. For effective coordination of such efforts, it is crucial that each party be enabled to maintain communications with a central command center and/or with each other.
Individual response parties can range from single individuals on foot to additional response vehicles and aircraft. Some situations may also involve different types of emergency response services from different areas of the country. Consequently, the communications and response equipment carried by each party can vary greatly and be incompatible with those of other parties. In some circumstances, effective emergency response may require the addition of administration or expertise by personnel that are located tens, hundreds, or even thousands of miles away from the location of the emergency situation. However, response parties that are on foot may be limited by the fact that hand held communication equipment can be of limited range.
As response parties enter and remain present in the field, their ability to perform emergency operations often depends upon both observable and non-observable environmental conditions. Such environmental conditions can include natural factors such as barometric pressure, wind velocity and temperature as well as man-made factors such as the presence of radioactive fallout and chemical and biological agents. It can be crucial for in-field personnel to remain informed about current and changing environmental conditions, though it may be impractical or impossible for personnel to carry the necessary measuring instrumentation into the field with them. In the case of firefighting, for example, the fire fighters need to constantly be aware of wind velocities. If winds shift, for example, the angle of attack and strategy for fighting a fire may have to be changed. Thus, personnel may have to rely on their wireless communication devices to receive environmental information as it is measured from a remote location.
Command, communication linking, and environmental monitoring operations may have to be conducted at a location that is physically in or near the field of the emergency situation. Given range limits on the personal communication devices of response parties and the advantages of taking environmental measurements in the vicinity of the emergency situation, a platform for conducting emergency response command operations must often be able penetrate deep into even the most inaccessible or remote locations when an emergency situation erupts there. Such locations may be separated from the nearest road, trail, or pathway by great distances and by various terrains that can include sand, mud, snow, ice, deep water, swamps, thickly wooded areas, grasslands, man made debris and obstacles such as stairways, concrete, sharp metal, and glass, and terrains exhibiting extreme vertical angles. Thus, an effective platform for quickly responding to such remote emergencies must be able to move across multiple different types of off-road environments without modification immediately preceding or during an emergency operation.
Previous attempts to integrate command, communication, and environmental monitoring operations during an emergency situation based in aircraft or at fixed locations have been limited by the inability of coordinators and administrators to get to the scene of the crisis so as to provide on-the-spot command with a knowledge of the environmental conditions of the incident. From a remote location, direct environmental measurements may not be possible. The high speed of aircraft and the distances of fixed command centers from the vicinity of the emergency situation can also make it difficult or impossible for in-field response parties to use their personal communication equipment to correspond with such command centers. Attempts to integrate such command centers using a base vehicle such as a tractor trailer, four-wheel or truck-style of vehicle have been limited since none of these vehicles can be used to traverse off-trail areas that are heavily wooded, full of the thickest swamps, mud, ice, or snow, or that require the crossing of deep waterways, i.e. amphibious operation.
Simply recognizing that it is important to coordinate among multiple parties and vehicles that are involved in an emergency response operation does not itself dictate the choice of platform for the coordinating function of the choice of information and presentation format. Thus, there remains a need for a way to control, coordinate, and administer the various parties that are involved in an emergency response operation that is conducted in a remote or inaccessible area.
The invention is a mobile emergency response platform for monitoring and conducting in-field administration and coordination of emergency response activities. The platform is based on an all-terrain vehicle of the type that can accommodate at least two persons and is driven by tracks such as tank tracks, at least six wheels, or a combination of both wheels and tracks. The all-terrain vehicle has the capability, without requiring in-field modification by an operator, of traversing multiple off-road surfaces that include, at minimum, each of sand, mud, snow, swampland, thickly wooded areas, ice, grasslands, man-made rubble and debris, surfaces having angles of about at least thirty degrees from horizontal, and the floatable operation of the vehicle on waterways. Thus, the vehicle can be driven directly from any one type of these terrains to any other type of these terrains without requiring alterations to the configuration of the vehicle.
The vehicle is equipped with a suite of electronic communication equipment that is capable of being moved with the platform across each off-road surface to a first remote location that is ideally in the vicinity of the emergency situation for optimal in-field command. The communication equipment is configured to have the capability of receiving, while being located at the first remote location, at least two types of wireless communication transmissions from one or more second remote locations, which are generally the positions of in-field response personnel, aircraft, or other remotely positioned command or information centers. While the platform is located at the first remote location, the platform is also capable of transmitting at least two types of wireless communication transmissions to each second remote location.
The electronic communication equipment has the additional capability, while the platform is located in the field at the first remote location, of performing a crossover operation in which an incoming signal of a first signal type is received, regenerated, possibly amplified, and relayed as a second signal type that is different from the first signal type. This crossover operation is two-way in that the electronic communication equipment can also receive an incoming signal of the second signal type and regenerate and relay the signal as a signal of the first signal type.
In-field environmental measurements are taken with an environmental monitoring station that is included and capable of being moved across the multiple off-road surfaces with the platform to the in-field first remote location. The environmental monitoring station is capable of taking in-field measurements of environmental conditions surrounding said platform, which are normally the environmental conditions of the area of the emergency. Most embodiments of the invention are configured to allow information about the in-field measurements taken by the environmental monitoring station to be transmitted to each second remote location in at least one of the first or second signal types.
Some embodiments of the invention include electronic positioning equipment as part of the platform on the all-terrain vehicle. The positioning equipment is capable of providing, at any given in-field first remote location, information about the position of the mobile platform. The electronic positioning equipment can use any one of a number of wireless technologies, having satellite, radio, mechanical, or hybrid-based position-measuring devices incorporated therein. The electronic communication equipment is often configured to also allow information about the position of the platform at a given first remote location to be transmitted directly to one or more second remote locations in at least one of the first or second signal types.
Those skilled in the art will realize that this invention is capable of embodiments which are different from those shown and that details of the structure of the mobile platform can be changed in various manners without departing from the scope of the invention. Accordingly, the drawings and descriptions are to be regarded as including such equivalent mobile platforms as do not depart from the spirit and scope of the invention.